'Yellowjackets' star Melanie Lynskey says she's now 'comfortable' with her body after spending years 'thinking how I could look better'

Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey has shed her body image insecurities.

The New Zealand-born actress, 44, spoke to People this week about how she internalized criticism about her appearance earlier in her career.

"I had a lot of beliefs when I started about what I was supposed to look like,” she told the magazine. “It feels very nice to be in a body that I'm comfortable in, to be aging and have people want to cast me."

Lynskey, who is next starring alongside Jessica Biel in Hulu’s true crime series Candy, shared that there was never a time in her life when she was “free from thinking how I could look better,” calling it a “real bummer” that’s “very normal for women.”

While Lynskey is comfortable in her body, earlier this year, she spoke to Rolling Stone about fending off body-shaming comments from a member of the Yellowjackets production staff.

"They were asking me, 'What do you plan to do? I'm sure the producers will get you a trainer. They'd love to help you with this,'" she said at the time.

She shared that her co-stars came to her defense, with Juliette Lewis writing a letter to producers.

In 2016, she told People that she battled eating issues earlier in her career, explaining that her hair had started falling out from her unhealthy behaviors.

“I was like, ‘I just need to look the way I’m supposed to look’ and have faith that people are going to want to put someone in a film or on a show who looks like this,” she explained. “I did have to truly become comfortable with myself, because you can’t fake it.”

Lynskey shared that it was important for her to have the characters she portrayed own their sexuality, so that people could see a woman who looked like her embracing that side of herself.

“There was one scene where I was supposed to be eating a hamburger and complaining, ‘I’m out of shape!'” the Togetherness alum recalled. “I said to them, ‘I’m not going to do that because I don’t want to put that out there.’ It’s very important to me that I’m playing a woman who looks like this, but is very in charge of her sexuality. She’s somebody who has desire and is desired and is a woman living her life.”

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